Our son is only 3, but this year, he’s starting at a Montessori school for pre-K through 8th grade students. And for the first time, I’m grappling with the fear and anxiety I know parents have been living with for years: what if there’s a shooting at my kid’s school?
The first time we toured his new school, my husband and I went together, signing in at the front office and getting our little name tag stickers. It was so much bigger than his in-home daycare of 12 kids. A pre-K teacher came to greet us and give us a tour. As she walked us out of the front office and into the halls, she opened a set of heavy, blue double doors.
And that’s when an image flashed through my brain: a photograph from a Washington Post story about the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. It showed a long, straight hallway with bright, painted walls, just like the one I was looking at, except there were body bags lining both sides. When the Post published their story, I hesitantly read it, knowing that as a journalist covering children’s health and safety, it mattered that I absorb the survivors’ accounts. As a parent touring my son’s potential new school, I wanted to scrub the whole thing from my brain.
We decided the school would be perfect for our son, and I kept that harrowing moment at the front doors to myself. But before long, my algorithm brought my fears of a school shooting right back to the surface. My TikTok feed served me a video of a mom talking about shoe inserts she bought for her kids. Underneath, they have a circular cutout the size of an AirTag so you can track your child’s whereabouts. Soon came another video, this time about a website selling bulletproof backpack inserts of varying sizes, essentially turning a regular book bag into an impenetrable shield.
Realistically, I know my son is too small to use an insert like this in a meaningful way — he probably couldn’t even lift the thing. And knowing his precise whereabouts within his school wouldn’t do me any good in the event there was a shooting. While I like to think I could get there in three minutes flat and extract him from his classroom, I’m not SEAL Team Six. But if we’re being honest, I still clicked through to the Amazon listing. And the only reason I didn’t buy them is because they don’t come in a small enough size.
It’s nauseating that these products exist at all, and grosser still that TikTok is pushing me to buy them; that this is just one more thing on the school supply list these days. Then again, I understand why products like this are bought and sold: they’re one small way parents can reclaim a sense of control. Gun violence is a systemic issue, the kind of thing that takes a very, very long time to change. But with these, I could get my hands on a little sliver of reassurance in two days’ time.
Eventually I told my husband about my fears. I’m scared to send our son to a bigger school full of more people I don’t know, more people walking in and out the doors all day long. But we both agreed that our son needs this — he’s outgrown daycare and he needs more learning, a bigger outdoor play area, more library excursions.
I also started talking to my friends and coworkers with kids. A close friend with three daughters said she often feels the same fears, but that volunteering at her kids’ school has been immensely helpful. Getting to know the administrators and teachers, the other kids, and roaming the halls made school feel more like a new community to be part of, and less like a strange place waiting for a hypothetical tragedy to befall it.
At our son’s open house last week, we got to meet his teacher. She was the one who gave us our tour, and I had a weird intuition then that he might end up in her class. She has been at the school for decades; so many of the teachers and admin have. They have a guitar-playing librarian, a chicken coop, and a steel drum club. When I got his school supply list and the first item listed was a clear backpack, these are the things I reminded myself of.
I’m not going to pretend my fear of a school shooting is gone; for every American parent, I’m sure that anxiety is going to linger permanently. But with the reassurance of parents who have been coping with it a little longer, I’m beginning to see that tragedies are unlikely. What is sure to happen is that my son will learn, grow, and become part of a new community that’s so ready to invest in him. That’s where I’m putting my energy for now — that, and voting like his life depends on it.
Katie McPherson is the Associate Lifestyle Editor at Romper and Scary Mommy. She loves reading, boxing, horseback riding, and rotting on the couch after a long day. She married her college sweetheart, and now they have one son, a very large dog, and achey joints.
